Alasania Blames GD, Ivanishvili, for Scrapped Air Defense Deal with France

Georgia could have had a fully developed air defense system from France by 2021, but the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party and its patron Bidzina Ivanishvili broke the deal, former Defense Minister Irakli Alasania told RFE/RL’s Georgian Service in a recent interview.

Alasania, who served as Defense Minister from 2012 to 2014 in the Georgian Dream government, said the deal had already been agreed upon when the government tried to pressure him to withdraw prior to the signing. His interview comes after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Georgia had violated fair trial rights in the high-profile “cable case” involving Defense Ministry officials at the time, which Alasania said was later used to pressure him to drop the proposed defense deal.

In 2013, Alasania says he met with then-French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, who asked Georgia to send troops to the Central African Republic. In return, Alasania said, France agreed to provide Georgia with an air defense system on a loan basis. Alasania identified the system as Aster-30. Aster-30 are French-made medium-range air defense rockets used mostly in the navy. However, the ground-based air defense system using Aster-30 is known as SAMP/T.

The agreement was set to be signed in October 2014. But on the eve of the signing, Alasania says he received a phone call from a senior Georgian official urging him to back out. He alleges that Bidzina Ivanishvili, the ruling party’s patron, who was no longer Prime Minister at that time, was behind the pressure.

Despite the pressure, he went ahead with the signing, saying the deal had been agreed with all the relevant Georgian and French institutions and officials. As he was about to sign the agreement, five employees of the Ministry of Defense were arrested in what he saw as an attempt to stop the deal.

Alasania signed an agreement anyway. “If I had not signed the agreement, it would have been a betrayal of everything, including these people and the country,” he said.

According to Alasania, the disruption of Georgia’s air defense deal was not just a locally generated idea. He recalled that at the beginning of the discussions on the procurement of the systems, Russian representatives made statements to this effect. He also reminisced that he was told that at one of the meetings, which he himself did not attend, Bidzina Ivanishvili said that he had to “personally apologize” to Putin because Alasania put him “in such a bad position with this decision.” According to Alasania “it is clear that this was not just an issue that Ivanishvili cooked up in his head, but a direct threat from Russia, … that this issue should not have yielded any results because it was unacceptable to them.”

On October 28, 2014, one former and four acting officials of the Ministry of Defense were arrested and charged with misspending GEL 4.1 million in an alleged sham tender in 2013 for the laying of fiber optic cable in 2014. They denied the charges. In 2016, the Tbilisi City Court sentenced them to seven years in prison for the alleged embezzlement. In January 2017, the Tbilisi Court of Appeal reclassified their charges as abuse of office. The new charge reduced their sentence from seven years to one year and six months in prison, but they were not allowed to defend themselves against the revised charges. In February 2017, they appealed to the Supreme Court, which refused to grant them leave to appeal. Eventually, then-President Giorgi Margvelashvili pardoned them and they were released in 2017. Despite their release, they took their case to the ECHR, which on February 11, 2025 found violations of the European Convention on Human Rights regarding the right to a fair trial. Alasania’s interview with RFE/RL’s Georgian service came after the court’s decision.

The controversial so-called “cable case” led to the first major rift within the GD. The GD’s then-PM Irakli Garibashvili dismissed Irakli Alasania (who was the leader of the Free Democrats party, part of the GD alliance) in November 2014, about a month after the latter signed the agreement with the French side on the development of the air defense system, despite alleged pressure from Bidzina Ivanishvili.

The deal between Georgia and France is “still in force,” Alasania said. According to him, “the window is still open if Georgia wants to pursue it,” calling the GD government’s decision to block the project an “unforgivable mistake.”

If the GD government had pursued the project, “Georgia’s air and all of our critical infrastructure would be protected by 2021,” Alasania said.

Also Read:

• 05/11/2014 – Alasania’s Free Democrats Quit GD Coalition

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